Art in Life: Fashioning Political Ideology Through Visual Culture in Mid-Century America

Life magazine debuted onto the American publishing scene in November, 1936. The third major publication to come out of Henry Luce's publishing empire, Time, Inc., Life was a picture magazine. It helped to transform visual culture in America, elevating images over text as a means of communication and developing an influential new style of photographic journalism first introduced in the magazine's inaugural issue with Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of the Fort Peck Dam (Figure 1). Ranging in subjects from international politics to society news, Life provided a visual survey of modern experience for its readers, a weekly synopsis of the state of the world presented through pictures elucidated with bold headlines and short captions. While Life's impact on photojournalism is well-known, the magazine's coverage of fine art is more obscure. And yet from its first issue, which included an article on the American painter John Steuart Curry, Life made a point of featuring fine art as a centerpiece of its visual pageant of American life. Henry Luce's ambitious prospectus for the magazine included art as an important aspect of the magazine's subject matter: "To see life: to see the world … to see man's work—his paintings, towers and discoveries … to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed."¹ The blend of entertainment and edification articulated by Luce was central to Life's presentation of fine art: by covering the world of painting and sculpture alongside society parties and international events, Life normalized art as an aspect of everyday life; by adopting a didactic approach to presenting art, the magazine attempted to shape the way mainstream America thought about artistic production and display.

At a time when the New Deal government was sponsoring federally-funded art projects that trumpeted ideals of cultural democracy, and politically radical artists were arguing for the role of art in promoting revolutionary social change, Life used popular consciousness of art to reinforce established social hierarchies. If art could be a weapon of class struggle or an instrument of state democracy, it could also, when embedded firmly in American visual culture, reinforce the core principles of democratic capitalism. Life's impact on American visual culture went beyond its innovations in photojournalism. With circulation in the millions and a preeminent place in mainstream American experience, Life brought art into the realm of mass consumption and politics into the realm of visual culture.

Figure 1.

Margaret Bourke-White, Fort Peck Dam, Life, November 23, 1936, cover.

LIFE^® used by permission of The Picture Collection Inc.

Life was instrumental in pushing art from the realm of the rarified to that of the popular. The magazine introduced readers to a broad spectrum of the art world: it provided a visual summary of the canon of Western art, introduced prominent American collectors and museums, and covered trends and events in the art world that infused art with a sense of spectacle. The magazine also made a point of featuring and fostering art by home-grown American artists. Like the New Deal government, Life declared a need for cultural stimulus in the United States and articulated a role for itself in contributing to the overall uplift of the country. Indeed, the magazine made a discernable point of highlighting what it called its "art program" and pointing out the national significance of its project to make fine art more accessible and knowable to the American public (Figure 2). Life emphasized that it could do what other distributors of color reproductions could not: bring art quickly, cheaply and regularly into the realm of mass consumption. In advertisements for the magazine within in its own pages, Life highlighted three ramifications of its art program: it showed how the magazine increased accessibility to the world's great art, how it showcased and promoted American artistic achievement, and how it inspired others to follow its example by undertaking new initiatives to expand the scope of art appreciation in America.

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